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The old thread was eleven years old and it's definitely time for a refresher. Welcome to the 3D Printing Megathread! Desktop additive manufacturing has come a ridiculously long way since the last thread was posted. You can spend anywhere from as little as a couple hundred USD to as much as you could possibly want and start churning out Warhammer armies and custom dildos in a matter of days! With as much variety and choice available to the 3D printing beginner it's hard to know where to turn and what to do once you've gotten there. This thread is for:
And on that note, a word of caution:  3D PRINTING CAN BE DANGEROUS FDM printers melt plastic at hundreds of degrees C for hours at a time. Resin printers use chemicals that are hazardous to human health and the environment. Dodgy manufacturers can and will skimp on build quality to increase profit margins which increases the risk of something going wrong. Always always ALWAYS be well-informed about your printer and its particular quirks before leaving it running unattended. ALWAYS use recommended personal protective equipment when handling resin. NEVER let children who are not fully educated on the risks - or anyone else for that matter - use your printer.Okay then! Selecting a Printer What kind of printers are available? Broadly speaking there are two categories of 3D printing that are accessible to the hobby market. The first is the filament deposition modeling, or FDM printers, which melt spools of plastic filament and squirt the plastic out of a hot nozzle to form a model vertically layer by layer. This technology has been in the hobby arena for many years and there are quite a lot of materials and printers available at a wide range of costs. The second is the stereolithography, SLA, or resin printers. These printers use a light source to solidify a material, usually UV light on liquid resin, to form models also vertically and layer by layer. Which one is right for me? The type of printer you choose to get is usually dictated by the sort of things you want to create. FDM printers:
Resin printers:
What You Need To Print Aside from a printer, obviously, both FDM and resin printers have consumables and tools which will make the printing experience better. FDM printing Filament Filament usually comes in 1kg spools. The world has pretty much standardized on filament with a 1.75mm diameter - 3mm diameter used to be a thing but to my knowledge there are no currently produced printers that use it. There are too many types of filament to effectively compare them all here, but All3dp has a good comparison post that's updated regularly. Filament quality can vary wildly by manufacturer. For best results here are some goon-recommended vendors in the US: Hypnolobster posted:There's really no reason to buy filament from random overseas brands that come and go on Amazon. Hatchbox is another good US vendor. For Eurogoons, Prusa makes and sells their own high quality filament in PLA, PETG, Polycarbonate, ASA, and PVB. Recommendations for Canadians: MustardFacial posted:filaments.ca and Spool3D make fairly decent stuff in in my experience. And for Ausgoons: Dia de Pikachutos posted:3dfillies.com [based in Melbourne AU] have been pretty good for me, and they have improved their PLA+ filament progressively over the last 18 months. I use it pretty much exclusively. Hot end components The hot end, the part what gets real toasty and poops out filament, is the number one location of wear-and-tear in an FDM printer. Filament clogs which end up destroying parts of the hot end are a sad fact of life, so it's a good idea to stock up on the following:
Resin printing Gloves and eye protection Get a lot of disposable gloves and some eye protection. UV curable resin is a skin and eye irritant and you absofuckinglutely do not want resin to cure on your flesh. The process is exothermic and can cause burns. If you do get some on yourself, flush the affected area with isopropyl alcohol or water and DO NOT let it get exposed to sunlight until cleaned. Resin UV curable resin is sold in 0.5L and 1L bottles. Once you have a model and slice it, the slicing software will give you an estimate of how much resin will be used up so you can gauge how much you need to buy (more than the slicer says - account for failures!). Some popular vendors are Elegoo and Siraya Tech. If all you want is to print a model and paint it afterwards, Elegoo Ceramic Gray is a classic that provides a good neutral for priming and painting. Washing Fluid Different resins have different requirements for post-print washing. Many are washed using IPA (isopropyl alcohol, not the beer) - 99% is great, 91% will get you there. During the pandemic IPA was hard to source so water washable resins became more popular. Household cleaners like Simple Green are also used for both water-washable and IPA washable resins. All used resin washing fluid, even water, is a hazardous material and should not be disposed of in a household drain! The fluid can be reused until it starts looking cloudy. Pour off used washing fluid to a spare transparent container and blast it with UV light in a curing station or sunlight to cure out any large amount of resin, then filter the resin chunks and dispose of them. Ultimately the washing fluid may be too contaminated to cure out excess resin and it will remain cloudy. At that point, dispose of the fluid according to your local municipality's rules for disposing hazmat like old paint or lead acid batteries.A UV light source You will need a source of UV light to cure the UV resin. There are prebuilt curing stations like the Anycubic Wash and Cure, ad-hoc curing stations like a UV fingernail polish hardener, a wide range of DIY solutions involving UV light sources (this can be hazardous to the eyes! DO NOT look directly at any source of UV light), or even Mister Golden Sun if you want to just sit your print outside for a while. A tool to remove the print from the plate Resin printers tend to have an extremely hard attachment to the build plate since the additive strategy involves forcibly peeling the cured resin off the film covering the light source. Most printers will come with a tool like a putty scraper that is intended to get under the build plate attachment and gently pry off - this is a process that takes practice and patience and may result in gouged hands if you slip. There is really only one sane solution in TYOOL 2021: buy a flex plate and just pop the print off when you're done. Easy peasy! Printing Things: The General Workflow Get you a Model All 3D printing starts with a model - this is a file which describes the 3D shape that you're going to print. They're usually STL, OBJ, 3MF, or similar files. Finding pre-built models If you're looking for something prebuilt, Thingiverse, PrusaPrinters, and MyMiniFactory are the ones I use. Browse or search these sites to find something you'd like to try to print and download the model. Creating custom models If you're looking to make something from scratch, there's Tinkercad, FreeCAD, Fusion360, Blender, ZBrush, and others. Each of these have their pros and cons which are beyond the scope of this OP, but each of them should have a pretty decent stock of tutorial videos on Youtube and the posters in this thread would be happy to help with specifics. I didn't mention OpenSCAD. OpenSCAD clicks with some users, usually people whose brains have already been ruined by computer programming, and really does not work well at all for others. It's also got some major limitations such as how it produces 3D object files with curved surfaces (it doesn't). Suffice to say that if you try it and you can make what you want to make, that's fantastic, but you may find that investing time in learning one of the aforementioned solutions is better for general purpose object modeling. Slicing Once you've got your model, it must be sliced. Neither FDM nor resin printers understand 3D object files in their raw form. An FDM printer accepts a series of instructions in gcode format that describe how the print head should move, what temperature it should set, how much plastic to extrude at any given time, etc. Resin printers need to know which pixels in their light source to illuminate for how long, and how fast and how often to raise the print bed. FDM slicers At the time of this writing PrusaSlicer is the slicer to beat. It's a fork of an earlier slicing software named slic3r which is maintained by the company which produces Prusa printers, but it can slice 3D object files and produce gcode for any FDM printer. Cura is the other big player in this space. Both allow for easy setting of material properties and printer parameters and extremely fine-grained tuning when necessary. Resin slicers In contrast to FDM printers which are de facto standardized on gcode, desktop resin printers are more restricted in what they can accept. Chitubox is the slicer used for Anycubic and Elegoo printers. Lychee is another option. Upload to the printer Once the object file is sliced the result is sent off to the printer. In the olden times this would mean keeping your printer tethered to your computer via a USB serial port and controlling it with something like Pronterface, but the world has moved on. Gcode can be transferred to an FDM printer by means of an SD card, USB stick (if supported), onboard Wi-fi (if supported), or a discrete printer controller like Octoprint (developed and maintained by forums poster foosel!). The slicing result for a resin printer is generally moved to the printer on a USB stick. In any case, once the sliced data is on the printer that's it! Tell the printer to print that model according to the specific instructions on the printer, then it's time to sit back and churn out some plastic poo poo. Resin print postprocessing If you're using a resin printer then you must postprocess the print once it's done being built. This involves two steps: washing and curing. Washing Washing the print removes stray uncured resin from the nooks and crannies and prepares the surface for curing. Depending on the resin, a wash will be in isopropyl alcohol (IPA), water, or some other substance recommended by the resin manufacturer. Place the model in a container of washing liquid, swirl it around, brush the little crevices gently with a soft toothbrush. Curing Curing is the process of exposing every surface of the print to a UV light source in order to harden the outer surface. Uncured prints will have a tacky sticky feeling and aren't fully safe to handle or paint. Stick the print under the UV light source of your choice until the surface is no longer tacky and can't be scratched by a fingernail. ---------- In Case Of Problems  oh god how did this happen If you're having an issue printing and want to post about it in this thread, we recommend including the following:
Happy printing! csammis fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Feb 6, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2021 03:16
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3D Printer Recommendations - Updated July 2021 This post is for collecting entry level 3D printer recommendations for people who are looking to purchase their first printer or for those who are into one technology and looking to swap to the next. If you have a printer which you think belongs here PM me to get it added! Prices are in USD. FDM Printers There have been multi-page slapfights over entry level FDM printers. The order in which these are presented is descending cost and not any sort of implicit recommendation. Please don't yell at me  Prusa MK3S+ - $750 kit, $1000 assembled
Prusa Mini - $350 kit, $400 assembled
Ender 3 Pro - $210
Resin Printers Sockser posted:For resin it’s like uh In terms of mechanical complexity resin printers are stupidly simple when compared to FDM printers and that's reflected in the fact that all resin printers are basically the same. They all use LCDs to emit UV light and they all use a single stepper motor to move the Z axis. The deciding factor of which specific printer to get will come down your individual budget and the following technology choices:
csammis fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jul 27, 2021 |
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Jul 19, 2021 03:16
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Ground floor Ok here is my contribution: List of goons willing to print your stuff for you, i.e. "Goon 3d printing directory" https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UAebpOkdSKwWXIIBAJa8V4Sl3w1Bfk1Il2v5iF_SEgA/edit#gid=0 Hadlock fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Jul 26, 2021 |
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Jul 19, 2021 05:10
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Ooh maybe I'll use this space to plug the CAD thread and SOLIDWORKS as another CAD option: CAD thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3962532 You can get it through the EAA for $40/year - it comes with your membership: https://www.eaa.org/eaa/eaa-membership/eaa-member-benefits/solidworks-resource-center And I can plug 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS for Makers when that drops later this year, which has SOLIDWORKS and some other fun web based stuff for $99/year or $10/mo: https://discover.solidworks.com/3dexperience-solidworks-makers-available-2nd-half-2021 Great OP! Yay new thread!
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Jul 19, 2021 12:18
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Just buy a Prusa should be in the printer recommendations 
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Jul 19, 2021 12:40
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mattfl posted:Just buy a Prusa should be in the printer recommendations Followed by an "Unless you hate yourself, in which case buy a Creality printer". 
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Jul 19, 2021 12:41
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Once a resin model was been washed/rinsed off, is it safe to handle with your bare hands, or is it only safe to handle once it's been fully cured?
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Jul 19, 2021 13:32
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Randalor posted:Once a resin model was been washed/rinsed off, is it safe to handle with your bare hands, or is it only safe to handle once it's been fully cured? Everything I see on a quick google says "Never touch resin with bare skin until it is fully cured and hardened" Here's Maker's Muse about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kHcsTG9QsM He says it multiple times in the video, but jump to the 9:00 mark and listen for a bit. Some Pinko Commie fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Jul 19, 2021 |
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Jul 19, 2021 13:42
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So I've been working on doing some resin casting in silicone molds. And I have been designing/printing the 'negatives' for the silicone mold. The amount of inside-out thinking I've been having to do has been kind of fun, but man my first couple of attempts came out bad. Once I get some finished product I'm not embarrassed to share, I'll post them up here. It's a pretty fun process, though, going from sketch to physical product.
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Jul 19, 2021 13:49
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NewFatMike posted:Ooh maybe I'll use this space to plug the CAD thread and SOLIDWORKS as another CAD option: Some info on 3D Creator and 3d Sculptor may be of interest to the thread as well.
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Jul 19, 2021 14:31
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Randalor posted:Once a resin model was been washed/rinsed off, is it safe to handle with your bare hands, or is it only safe to handle once it's been fully cured? I never touch anything that comes off my resin printer with bare hands until it's been fully cured. It's too easy for resin to sit in little cracks/holes on the model.
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Jul 19, 2021 15:04
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This is one of the resources that helped me pick my first printer. The post by /u/sausage54 has a lot of info and it gets updated every once in a while. vvvvv But that may also work Chernabog fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Jul 19, 2021 |
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Jul 19, 2021 15:07
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csammis posted:--- This post reserved for 3D printer recommendations --- Can you afford a Prusa? Get a Prusa If not, Can you wait two months for a Prusa mini? Get a Prusa mini. If not, can you swing an Ender3 pro? Get an ender3 pro If not, get an Ender3 I think that is the complete newbie rundown for FDM at least For resin it’s like uh “Pick the one that looks the coolest from the Elegoo, Photon, Phrozen lineup”
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Jul 19, 2021 15:07
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Sockser posted:Can you afford a Prusa? Get a Prusa Don't forget EPAX. I've had 2 EPAX resin printers and they've both been solid. They are a little more pricey but I feel a bit better quality and their support is outstanding.
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Jul 19, 2021 15:11
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Everything I see on a quick google says "Never touch resin with bare skin until it is fully cured and hardened" mattfl posted:I never touch anything that comes off my resin printer with bare hands until it's been fully cured. It's too easy for resin to sit in little cracks/holes on the model. Oh, okay. I set up my Elegoo Mars 2 Pro and Elegoo Mercury Plus on Sunday, and made the test print that they included (thanks to the person in the previous thread who suggested running them under hot water to get them to pop off to someone else), and I didn't handle them with bare hands until they had gone through the curing station for several minutes, and even then I had washed my hands immediately afterwords. I just wasn't sure if I was being "too cautious" by wearing them for so long (I know, I know, "when dealing with toxins, there's no such thing as too cautious").
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Jul 19, 2021 15:46
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AlexDeGruven posted:So I've been working on doing some resin casting in silicone molds. And I have been designing/printing the 'negatives' for the silicone mold. In really interested in hearing about your results, and hope you don't skip mentioning "poo poo that didn't work" when you do share it!
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Jul 19, 2021 16:25
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I just got my first printer this week, a Prusa MK3s+, after having played around with a MakerBot a decade ago. I'm hooked. Does anyone have a good tutorial about snap joints? I've found a bunch, but a lot are kinda garbage or marketing or both.
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Jul 19, 2021 16:51
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Some info on 3D Creator and 3d Sculptor may be of interest to the thread as well. For sure - I believe both roles come with 3DX for Makers, but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.
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Jul 19, 2021 16:59
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Rectovagitron posted:I just got my first printer this week, a Prusa MK3s+, after having played around with a MakerBot a decade ago. Formlabs has a really good one, but YMMV in FDM printing. https://formlabs.com/blog/designing-3d-printed-snap-fit-enclosures/
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Jul 19, 2021 16:59
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The Eyes Have It posted:In really interested in hearing about your results, and hope you don't skip mentioning "poo poo that didn't work" when you do share it! Of course. The main thing in the 'poo poo that didn't work' was thinking the opposite of the opposite. And with molds, the negative of the negative is more than just the positive. My main issue so far has been accurately pouring the resin components. Good thing I've got literal gallons of the poo poo.
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Jul 19, 2021 19:50
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Ground floor. Currently running a Prusa Make and likely selling my old Monoprice Maker Ultimate.
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Jul 19, 2021 20:25
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It's probably worth mentioning that the Ender 3 v2 is going to be the one to look at (right now) if you're getting an Ender 3 over the Ender 3 Pro. It seems to have the upgrades of the Pro and then some extras like silent steppers that are huge quality of life improvement. That said there are drop-in mainboard replacements from Creality for their Ender 3 machines for under $30 that include the silent stepper drivers so it's not that big of a deal.
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Jul 19, 2021 21:02
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AlexDeGruven posted:So I've been working on doing some resin casting in silicone molds. And I have been designing/printing the 'negatives' for the silicone mold. I’ve been designing and making directly-printed metal casting molds from high-temp-resistant engineering resins, so sort of the literal mirror of what you’re doing i suppose. Nice to find someone else using hobby resin printers for technical/production work, it’s incredible how many doors a $300 machine opens when it lets you one-button print any high-detail model you want if it’ll fit on your build plate. i post my stuff in the other bigass 3d printing thread in diy, check it out some time~ out of curiosity, how do you seal/treat your models so they don’t interfere with the silicone curing? that’s one of the biggest hurdles to using resin printing as part of a silicone mold making workflow.
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Jul 19, 2021 21:12
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Upgraded my Voron 2.1 to 2.4, with more than a year of delay. Did some wiring overkill, because I wanted the goddamn wiring harness and the electronics decoupled.  
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Jul 19, 2021 22:27
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drat, if you had a wee bit more room, you could have used proper wiring channels and everything Looks really, really good though!
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Jul 19, 2021 22:29
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Ambrose Burnside posted:I’ve been designing and making directly-printed metal casting molds from high-temp-resistant engineering resins, so sort of the literal mirror of what you’re doing i suppose. Nice to find someone else using hobby resin printers for technical/production work, it’s incredible how many doors a $300 machine opens when it lets you one-button print any high-detail model you want if it’ll fit on your build plate. i post my stuff in the other bigass 3d printing thread in diy, check it out some time~ I'm doing fdm to make the molds for the silicone molds for epoxy resin. Print -> fill with molding silicone -> add resin
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Jul 19, 2021 22:53
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I’ll 2nd the vote to include the Ender 3 V2 as the machine to buy if your budget is sub-$300. I currently run a small print farm of 5x Ender 3 machines, 2 of them age the Ender 3 Pro, 3 of them are Ender 3 V2. They’re solid machines out of the box, but a couple QoL upgrades should be purchased along with the machine. Namely some silicon bed springs, a metal extruder arm and a spring steel removable bed with a Th3d EZ-Flex attached. Having said that, I’m going to be moving my office/print room into a larger bedroom. I’m planning on printing/selling enough things in the meantime to replace all of my Enders with Prusas.
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Jul 19, 2021 22:58
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AlexDeGruven posted:I'm doing fdm to make the molds for the silicone molds for epoxy resin. i missed that, whoops. yeah that’s much simpler, thermoplastics don’t poison the silicone cure process like basically “all” acrylate resins apparently will, there are a bunch of surfacing/passivating techniques people apparently use but i haven’t tried em myself
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Jul 19, 2021 23:24
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Ambrose Burnside posted:i missed that, whoops. yeah that’s much simpler, thermoplastics don’t poison the silicone cure process like basically “all” acrylate resins apparently will, there are a bunch of surfacing/passivating techniques people apparently use but i haven’t tried em myself Yeah, I haven't made the leap to resin printing yet. I don't have the space for my existing printers and K40 as it is.
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Jul 20, 2021 01:20
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so, uh, anyone know how to get out a prusa mk3s brass nozzle that sheared off inside the heatblock while being replaced despite being torqued to prusa's specifications? asking for a friend
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Jul 20, 2021 03:38
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Any screw removal kit should do it and probably easier than actual screws if I'm reading that right.
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Jul 20, 2021 03:45
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And just to be sure, you are heating the nozzle up before trying to take it out, right? Because I don't see how you could have sheared the brass apart unless you tried to unscrew it cold, and you will have an absolute gently caress of a time getting what's left of it out if you try to do it again.
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Jul 20, 2021 03:49
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Sagebrush posted:And just to be sure, you are heating the nozzle up before trying to take it out, right? Because I don't see how you could have sheared the brass apart unless you tried to unscrew it cold, and you will have an absolute gently caress of a time getting what's left of it out if you try to do it again. The brand new one sheared while I was putting it back on. Despite using a properly set torque wrench. Maybe my torque wrench is broken. And yes, it was at 285. I'm just gonna replace the heatblock, and potentially break. Deviant fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Jul 20, 2021 |
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Jul 20, 2021 04:00
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That's wacky. I'd double-check your torque wrench, definitely. And make sure you're not, say, accidentally using foot-pounds when you should be using inch-pounds. It's possible that you just had a freak bad nozzle but I've never seen that happen before. Personally I don't use a torque wrench; I just go until it stops turning, then do another 1/8 turn after that and it's good.
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Jul 20, 2021 04:09
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Sagebrush posted:That's wacky. I'd double-check your torque wrench, definitely. And make sure you're not, say, accidentally using foot-pounds when you should be using inch-pounds. It's possible that you just had a freak bad nozzle but I've never seen that happen before. Their doc says 2.5 Nm, so I set my wrench to 22 inch pounds:  but i'll just use your method on the replacement. Garage edit: never buy a harbor freight torque wrench. Deviant fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Jul 20, 2021 |
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Jul 20, 2021 04:12
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Sagebrush posted:I just go until it stops turning, then do another 1/8 turn after that 
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Jul 20, 2021 04:19
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Turn it until it creaks, then back off an eighth of a turn.
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Jul 20, 2021 04:38
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it's fine. i'll get it fixed thursday and have learned a valuable lesson. and maybe try an extractor to save the old heatblock/break.
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Jul 20, 2021 04:56
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Deviant posted:. Fixed
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Jul 20, 2021 09:13
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So I went to check out whether Meshmixer updated meanwhile, turns out it's kind of abandoned. Any good alternatives? I suppose Blender?
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Jul 20, 2021 10:04
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